Running

The ESMValCore package provides the esmvaltool command line tool, which can be used to run a recipe.

To run a recipe, call esmvaltool run with the desired recipe:

esmvaltool run recipe_python.yml

If the configuration file is not in the default location ~/.esmvaltool/config-user.yml, you can pass its path explicitly:

esmvaltool run --config_file /path/to/config-user.yml recipe_python.yml

It is also possible to explicitly change values from the config file using flags:

esmvaltool run --argument_name argument_value recipe_python.yml

To automatically download the files required to run a recipe from ESGF, set offline to false in the User configuration file or run the tool with the command

esmvaltool run --offline=False recipe_python.yml

This feature is available for projects that are hosted on the ESGF, i.e. CMIP3, CMIP5, CMIP6, CORDEX, and obs4MIPs.

To control the strictness of the CMOR checker, use the flag --check_level:

esmvaltool run --check_level=relaxed recipe_python.yml

Possible values are:

  • ignore: all errors will be reported as warnings

  • relaxed: only fail if there are critical errors

  • default: fail if there are any errors

  • strict: fail if there are any warnings

To re-use pre-processed files from a previous run of the same recipe, you can use

esmvaltool run recipe_python.yml --resume_from ~/esmvaltool_output/recipe_python_20210930_123907

Multiple directories can be specified for re-use, make sure to quote them:

esmvaltool run recipe_python.yml --resume_from "~/esmvaltool_output/recipe_python_20210930_101007 ~/esmvaltool_output/recipe_python_20210930_123907"

The first preprocessor directory containing the required data will be used.

This feature can be useful when developing new diagnostics, because it avoids the need to re-run the preprocessor. Another potential use case is running the preprocessing part of a recipe on one or more machines that have access to a lot of data and then running the diagnostics on a machine without access to data.

To run only the preprocessor tasks from a recipe, use

esmvaltool run recipe_python.yml --remove_preproc_dir=False --run_diagnostic=False

Note

Only preprocessing tasks that completed successfully can be re-used with the --resume_from option. Preprocessing tasks that completed successfully, contain a file called metadata.yml in their output directory.

To run a reduced version of the recipe, usually for testing purpose you can use

esmvaltool run --max_datasets=NDATASETS --max_years=NYEARS recipe_python.yml

In this case, the recipe will limit the number of datasets per variable to NDATASETS and the total amount of years loaded to NYEARS. They can also be used separately. Note that diagnostics may require specific combinations of available data, so use the above two flags at your own risk and for testing purposes only.

To run a recipe, even if some datasets are not available, use

esmvaltool run --skip_nonexistent=True recipe_python.yml

It is also possible to select only specific diagnostics to be run. To tun only one, just specify its name. To provide more than one diagnostic to filter use the syntax ‘diag1 diag2/script1’ or ‘(“diag1”, “diag2/script1”)’ and pay attention to the quotes.

esmvaltool run --diagnostics=diagnostic1 recipe_python.yml

To get help on additional commands, please use

esmvaltool --help

Note

ESMValTool command line interface is created using the Fire python package. This package supports the creation of completion scripts for the Bash and Fish shells. Go to https://google.github.io/python-fire/using-cli/#python-fires-flags to learn how to set up them.